In Memoriam Claude Chabrol

Parallels are perilous; it would be tempting to call Claude Chabrol, who died on Sunday at the age of eighty, the Falstaffian figure of the French New Wave (though his friend Paul Gégauff, who became his screenwriter as well as one of his stars, lived far more riotously and suffered for it far more grievously). But if Falstaff had lived in the twentieth century, he might well have made movies and been spared the royal rebuff, and he might have resembled the cheerfully caustic and openly hedonistic Chabrol.

Interviewed in Libérationin 1995 about being in his sixties, he said, "Except for the fact that one fucks much less than at twenty—except for that horrible detail, everything is better"; and that newspaper interviewed him about his gourmandise twice, in 2003 and last year, upon the publication of the cookbook and film book "Chabrol Se Met &#224 Table" ("Chabrol Sits Down to Eat"). The filmmaker liked to cite the country phrase "faire chabrol," which refers to the practice of pouring a bit of wine in a nearly empty bowl of soup and drinking the blend. His wide-rangingly cynical satire was aimed in particular at the pompous bourgeoisie, its assumptions of earned authority and hypocrisy of public honors. He was plus bourgeois que les bourgeois, but cavalier about it and unproud of it; he took his pleasures gleefully and without dissimulation, ostentation, or bien-pensant respect for the trappings of respectability, and he filmed the same way.

He was a movie buff who started writing for Cahiers du Cinéma at the age of twenty-three, in 1953 (with a piece about "Singin' in the Rain"); he co-wrote, with Eric Rohmer, a book about Hitchcock (which appeared in 1957). He was the practical man of the New Wave—starting in 1955, he worked as a publicist in the Paris office of Twentieth Century-Fox (and then helped Jean-Luc Godard get a job there too). He was the first of the New Wave filmmakers to make a feature, in 1957 ("Le Beau Serge")—he did so with an inheritance from his first wife's family—and with the money he made back from his first films, he financed the first features of his cohorts Rohmer and Jacques Rivette. His second film, from 1958, "Les Cousins," is one of his best. Set in the riotous milieu of Parisian students and their bohemian friends, it tells the classic story of the ant and the grasshopper—and it tilts all to the favor of the grasshopper. Here's Chabrol, in his very entertaining 1976 critical autobiography "Et Pourtant Je Tourne…" ("And, Yet, I Shoot…"),* on his classmates at the prestigious Institut d'Études Politiques in Paris, known as Sciences-Po, where he spent a miserable week:

They were pretentious kids, or else, children of worthies—heirs, heir-heads—or else, they were hard workers who were servile and en route to jerkification. They all stank of caste, self-importance, pedantry. Their ignorance of life, of people, was gross. They perorated in two vocal registers: the haughty and worldly, in order to drip, like dowagers, such lines as "What a world" or "It's crazy"; the other—doctoral—to dissertate on nonsense without having taken the trouble to think, or to look anywhere but in a book…. And yet it's a matter of our daily existence, because we are stupid enough to let these pipsqueaks govern us, legislate for us, administer us.

This sublime venom infuses his best films; besides "Les Cousins," there's "Les Bonnes Femmes," from 1960, which seethes with derision equally for the unhappy drudges who run a small store and the fanciful young women who, while toiling there, harbor romantic dreams and illusions. It's worth mentioning a hysterically extravagant movie unavailable here on video, "Les Godelureaux" (meaning "smooth operators"), from 1961, a movie of a rare emotional sadism, a portrait of frivolous youth in its naïve and sentimental varieties, a dazzling catalogue of cinephilic winks and nods along with the emotional registers to match, a depiction of a primordial toga party to end all toga parties, a quasi-documentary on the artistic happenings of the day; it is perhaps the most sumptuously bourgeois of his anti-bourgeois outrages. Recently, there's "The Comedy of Power," from 2006, in which Chabrol depicts happy wickedness with wry sympathy: a high-placed government official (Isabelle Huppert) who prosecutes a businessman for insider trading turns out to be a narrow, joyless scold, unlike the expansive, carnal, if arrogant, target of her investigation. His last feature, "Bellamy," a police drama starring Gérard Depardieu, is scheduled for release here soon.

Chabrol was the cinematic equivalent of a graphomaniac—in fifty-two years, he made about seventy films, and the haste sometimes showed, in positive and negative ways. Following the ideal of the Hollywood studio director that stopped existing around the time his own career started, Chabrol made commissioned films, personal films, films in many genres (though he made the detective story and the Hitchcockian suspense thriller something of a specialty), films on high and low budgets, and the result was a sort of automatic writing in which the personality—insolent and sybaritic, easygoing and paradoxical, deeply intelligent yet casually superficial, passionate yet capable of stunning detachment—shines through unmistakably. At his best, he was, simply, the peer of his peers.